Bykert Gallery

Peter Gourfain entered public awareness as a painter of geometrical organizations considerably in the debt of Reinhardt, for all their differences in motif—Gourfain’s capsules rather than Reinhardt’s nine square grids. To have broken through this serial and monochromatizing straightjacket marked Gourfain as an artist of remarkable stature, one of enormous inventiveness, who, like Bollinger, was able to redirect the thrust of the sculpture of the later ’60s. Unlike Bollinger, who has tended toward errant dispositions, Gourfain has tended to extrapolate on the extraordinary discovery he made in his pastel stick wall drawings. These were rudimentary examinations of figure/ground relationships appended directly to the wall without intermediary of paint, canvas, stretcher-supports—although the pastel stick is, legalistically speaking, a kind of paint. Instead of retrenching into a decorative